real boy
the thing is my parents are sweeter now, sometimes. but it is the inconsistency of the past that has written itself into my nerves and made me a cringing prey animal, tiny heart beating a vibrational pattern in my trembling chest. i'm scared of them but i love them yet at the same time i want to run away from them and never see them again.
how do i reconcile my intense desire for familial connection with my aversion to being around them? they know me not well enough but also too much. i share their dna; their histories are carved into my bones, so i share their pain to an extent. maybe that is the problem: our blood binds us together in a feedback loop of traumatic faith, an amplification of hurt echoing down a family tree of survivors.
desperation is kin to me the way survival manifests in the starving. we're trying our best. our bests are defined all differently and take nebulous forms that only fit one point in spacetime. i can't hold my parents to the clarity of hindsight. i can't expect them to have known. i can't tell them that their god who, like atlas, holds up their lives isn't mine. they have no schema for understanding there. you cannot expect someone to deny their nature.
i think it's unfair, that their twenty-one-year-old child flays themselves into a mat of empathy that they can tread on. but i can't help it. it's my nature: i am their child.
it too is unfair of me to want something from them that they can't give. how do i accept that i am not a full person in their eyes? these people see me as a moldable, intriguingly randomly-generated set of traits and interests, but they were supposed to accept me as their kid. how do i stop wanting their affection and accept that i am potential to them, not a human being? i can't seem to conceptualize this. i know i shouldn't fault myself. and there it goes again: the shoulds i was raised on instead of milk, flooding my brain 24/7 like a kick reflex.
all i want is to be a real boy.
the house i was raised in was the perfect simulacrum of a nuclear family. married husband and wife, two children, homeowners, god-fearing, well-educated: a beautifully composed portrait that passerby would admire and praise. but the gap between the experiences i know and the ugly responses i feel illustrate there was a stepford-esque horror somewhere there.
but they were my loving, perfect parents! they were trying! they did what they thought was best for me! they were merely trying to keep me safe!
it doesn't change the fact that they raised an ideal and not a daughter, a project and not a child. the result is someone who feels unreal all the time, sense of self a wraith, craving violence to feel alive. they tried very hard to give me certainty but the person i actually am was never accepted so i stand on shaky ground.
i'm so lonely. i want to be wanted so badly it is embarrassing. but don't we all? maybe the boy my dad used to be and the girl my mom used to be dreamed of having family and belonging somewhere and having children who would not feel the loneliness they felt growing up. the same thing i long for. maybe the fantasy in their head stayed a fantasy. maybe they couldn't see anything else but a concept in me.
please, God, if you care at all about me, please keep my head out of the sand and settled on my shoulders and keep my feet firmly planted on the ground. please, God, break down my idealism and guilt and fear and keep me here, in the present, present to love and see clearly those around me.
i'm done writing about this. i'll save this document and get up from my desk. i'm done wishing. time to exist in the here and now and be a real boy.